Dissertation Research
Un/Commonplaces: Redirecting Research and Curricula in Rhetoric and Writing Studies
Committee:
Dr. Helen Foster, Director, Rhetoric and Writing Studies Program
Dr. Carlos Salinas, Rhetoric and Writing Studies Program
Dr. Robert Nachtmann, Dean, College of Business Administration
Dissertation Abstract:
Un/Commonplaces is guided by a broad and fundamental question of inquiry regarding writing and disciplinary research: how can some of the predominant ways that our discipline has approached writing be retheorized to better approximate the complexity of contemporary rhetorical knowledge work? A corollary inquiry explores the resonances with English Studies that persist—and seeks to uncover how they persist—in our field. I argue that we can negotiate such issues by tracing and troubling some of our core disciplinary commonplaces, those commonsense notions and practices too frequently and easily adopted from English Studies and perpetuated within the often tumultuous and hegemonic relationship between our disciplines. I ground my research in these commonplaces, tracing their adoption and proliferation, while arguing that their long term effects have been and continue to be potentially stifling to knowledge work in our field.
Specifically, my project examines commonplace notions of text and intertextuality, the idea that “writing is recursive,” the disciplinary identification and preoccupation with composition rather than writing, and the historical privileging of pedagogy over (and often in lieu of) curriculum development. In tracing these commonplaces, I also work to establish new directions for our research that are sometimes grounded in our own, often overlooked disciplinary theory, while also moving outside of the humanities in search of cross-disciplinary collaboration.
I am interested in rhetoric’s relationship to epistemological development, but I am also explicitly concerned with issues of transfer and rhetoric’s role in the management and movement of knowledge. To that end, I foreground issues of technology in my research, exploring social networking applications, ubiquitous computing technologies, course delivery platforms and professional intranets, and the extensibility and circulation of information.
1 year ago